


Auto-Pilot

by aralias



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 21:25:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8939908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias
Summary: The Federation has a new way of making mutoids.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [still_lycoris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_lycoris/gifts).



They found Tarrant standing very still in a small room, facing the wall, still dressed in the Federation uniform he had worn at the start of the mission.

“Come _on_ ,” Avon snarled as he blocked the closing door with his body. He kept his gun arm on the outside of the frame so he could fire at any guards who appeared around the end of the corridor. “We’re wasting time.”

Someone did round the corner then, and Avon shot them accordingly. Vila, who unlike Avon had entered the room fully, turned back from his inspection of their errant pilot.

“Avon, I think there’s something wrong.”

“You think?” Avon said, taking out another guard with another satisfyingly accurate shot.

“He’s not moving,” Vila explained. His voice took on a considering tone: one usually only heard when he was examining a lock, the voice of the professional hidden beneath the idiot. “Programming, I think.” He snapped his fingers a few times, presumably (Avon did not turn around to check) in front of Tarrant’s un-blinking eyes. “Hm, it’s a nasty one. Slow reactions, blinking half the normal speed. It’s either permanent or he’s particularly susceptible. Ah—Now, what’s this…? Oh dear. Oh no, no that’s not good––”

Avon considered turning around to see what Vila had found, but that would leave the room vulnerable to approach. While he could ask Vila, who seemed less useless today than usual, whatever had happened to Tarrant sounded serious enough that Avon should probably investigate for himself.

“ _Dayna!”_ he yelled down the corridor, and waited, while Vila continued to make interested, worried noises behind him. A moment, and then something exploded just past the corner. Another moment and Dayna herself sprinted around the same corner and through the doorway Avon was guarding.

“Take over,” he told her and (assuming she would do so) turned and joined Vila at Tarrant’s end of the room.

“What’s wrong with Tarrant?” Dayna asked without taking her eyes off the enemy.

“Sulking,” Avon said. “We hope,” but the joke was in poor taste and he knew it well before Vila handed him the control box. A small thing, intended to be inserted into the upper back once the rest of surgery had been completed, the box allowed a commanding officer to quickly and easily programme the subject with orders and then wipe the memory again afterwards, if necessary.

“Pre-mutoid conditioning,” Vila said quietly, as though afraid Dayna would hear.

“I can see that,” Avon said.

How had it been done so fast? Mutoid conditioning generally took weeks. Was there a new process? Did they have that to fear as well? Not that it mattered at the moment. Something to worry about later _, if_ they survived this.

He raised his teleport bracelet and activated it. “Soolin, we need to leave a little sooner than planned. Bring the Scorpio in.”

“It’s that serious?” Danya said, worried, and Avon snarled,

 _“Watch the door,”_ and she turned back before demanding,

“Avon, what is it?”

“You know you’re still in the area of teleport disruption,” Soolin’s voice said from the bracelet.

“We will _move_ ,” Avon said. “Be ready to bring us up in five minutes.” He disconnected the signal. “Dayna,” he explained as he began typing commands into the control box, “Tarrant has been wiped ready for mutoid conversion. We have to get from this end of the facility to the external door, so that the teleport can pick us up, and we do not have time to locate Orac’s weapon. Any questions? I didn’t think so.”

He typed in the execute code, and Tarrant turned smoothly and began to walk towards the door, his face as blank as the mutoid the Federation intended him to become. Dayna’s face, on the other hand, was riven with horror. Avon chose not to castigate her for not watching the door this time.

“It is reversible?”

“Probably,” Vila said.

“Avon?” Dayna said.

“Give Tarrant your spare gun,” Avon said, rather than respond.

Orac had deprogrammed Blake, so it seemed likely the computer could de-programme Tarrant, but then again, it had been a different sort of programming. Tarrant was either dead now, or he wasn’t. Vila was probably right – _probably_ was almost certainly the answer, but Avon preferred not to give Dayna hope before he knew for certain.

He watched her hold out her gun, her eyes wide, and he watched as Tarrant responded to the command Avon himself had keyed in only a moment before and took that gun.

“Let’s go,” Avon said, and he and Dayna and Vila dashed out of the door, followed by Tarrant at the leisurely pace of the vampire. Avon spared a moment to glance down at the control box again, typed in a command and Tarrant’s pace sped up to match the others. It would have been easier if he’d had time to programme Tarrant to respond to vocal commands, but the longer they stayed, the greater the risk of discovery. Instead he’d just hacked straight into the hardware of Tarrant’s brain – simple commands that would be followed exactly.

He looked up at the sound of Dayna’s gun firing, and ducked back against the wall next to Vila. Four more Federation troopers. Pre-programmed to defend himself, Tarrant raised his gun and accurately shot one of the troopers in the shoulders.

“Where’s his sense of self-preservation?” Vila shouted as he and Avon both shielded themselves from another of Dayna’s explosions while Tarrant didn’t.

“I forgot to tell him to have one,” Avon said grimly, once the dust had cleared and the other troopers were lying dead on the floor. This wasn’t going to work, he knew that now. They had too far to go, and there was too much that could go wrong. “Let’s try something else,” he told Vila, pressing the control box into the other man’s hands and striding off down the corridors towards the dead troopers.

He pulled a helmet off the nearest one and the badge, and the gun. Tarrant was already dressed in a Federation uniform, part of the plan that hadn’t worked to investigate a lead Orac hadn’t been specific about, and so it was easy enough to finish off the effect with the helmet pushed down over his head.

“Everyone hide your guns,” he said, stowing his own inside his jacket.

“We’ll be killed,” Vila protested.

“If you were a Federation guard escorting three prisoners would you allow them to keep their weapons?” Avon said. “No, you wouldn’t, so do as I say. Now Tarrant,” he continued, addressing the man as though he could hear, even as he keyed further overrides directly into Tarrant’s brain, “I need you to pretend to be a Space Captain again. We’re your prisoners, and you need to get us to the other side of the complex. If anyone tries to stop you, you will stop them. Now have you got that?”

Tarrant’s borrowed Federation gun jabbed him in the side. “Move it, scum.”

“Ah,” Avon said, face lighting up in the smile he knew made him look slightly crazy. “Initiative. Better than I expected. Dayna, in front of me. Vila--”

“Move it!” Tarrant barked, jabbing him harder in the back, and Avon decided to tone-down the initiative _if_ possible.

They almost made the exit without running into any trouble Tarrant couldn’t handle – a couple of lower-ranking troopers who saluted and said ‘Well done, sir,’ and another guarding the outer-ring who waved them through once Avon had encouraged Tarrant to press his badge against the reader. The problem came as they could see the outer door – a commander, brighter than the rest, insisted not only that Tarrant and his party stop, but also that nobody had been given any orders for the prisoners to be transferred outside. What’s more, there was no possible reason _for_ the prisoners to be transferred outside – where were they going, a field trip?

The speed and accuracy with which Avon typed had long been envied by his technician colleagues, but even he found it hard to dictate and submit Tarrant’s replies fast enough for the ex-Space Captain not to seem peculiar.

“Don’t … want to get blood … on the floor … sir. These walls… are very white … sir. Devil to keep clean …. Bad idea … to question them, sire.” (Damn, typo. Move on.) “Very bad, sir. This lot … will escape. Very good at escaping – This one in particular” a jab at Vila “might look like an idiot, sir … and might sound like an idiot—”

Vila, of course (a good actor under other circumstances) protested at this, and Dayna (a terrible actress under all circumstances) began to laugh. Avon supposed it was faintly ridiculous, but _not_ ridiculous enough to die for. Fortunately they’d made it far enough, apparently, and Soolin pulled them up as Dayna shot the guard commander for good measure.

 _“That_ was the best impression of a loyal officer?” Dayna asked, still laughing as they materialised in the teleport bay.

“Was that _yours_ of someone interested in survival?” Avon shot back.

“I don’t do fear well,” Dayna admitted. Her face fell again. “Tarrant is going to be all right, isn’t he?”

“Orac,” Avon said, picking the little computer up from its perch next to the flight controls, “and I will discuss it.” He carried Orac off the flight deck, and into Scorpio’s only other room. If the news was bad, better that Dayna and the others not hear it spoken by an opinionated and tactless plastic box. Avon was a poor substitute for an empathetic leader, but he was better than Orac was.

Twenty minutes later he returned to find the rest of the crew breathless with laughter. Tarrant was doing what seemed to be a jig in the centre of the room, and singing the Federation anthem with rude words substituted for the names of planets that had been conquered.

Avon searched the room for the guilty party, and found him clutching the control box with one hand while he wiped tears from his eyes with the other.

“ _Vila_!” Avon snarled, unable to think of any stronger inditement. Vila’s fingers whisked nimbly across the keyboard, and Tarrant leapt over, slinging an arm around Vila.

“Oh, now, don’t be angry at my bestest ever pal, Vila,” Tarrant said. “Vila who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and practically runs this place all by himself.” He ruffled Vila’s hair affectionately, and Vila grinned at Avon. “He didn’t mean any harm - did you, Vila?”

“No,” Vila said. “No harm done.”

“Do you think this is funny?” Avon said to Vila.

“Very,” Vila said.

“Let me try,” Soolin said, and Vila threw the box to her. She typed something, and Tarrant broke away from Vila to point at Avon,

“Now Avon,” he said seriously, “I’m ten times the man Blake was, so you might as well start knuckling down and obeying orders. _Relax_. And – get a haircut. You look like my aunt.”

Avon blinked very slowly to give himself time to think. Then he said, as pleasantly as possible, “ _This …_ could be permeant. This could be all that’s left of Tarrant. And you think that’s funny, do you?”

“It’s not permanent though, is it,” Vila said. “Is it?” he said when Avon didn’t immediately answer. “It can’t be. Orac will figure it out. And,” he said when the silence continued, “I’ve got over worse than this in an afternoon.”

“ _Is_ it permanent, Avon?” Soolin said, her voice hard. Her voice warned him not to mess them around, but Avon was too angry to be anxious, if he ever would have been.

He let the smiles completely die on the faces of his crew, and then he smiled broadly and falsey.

“It is not, as it happens, permanent. Orac will start a course of treatment and Tarrant will be back to normal in a few hours. That does not change the _facts,_ which are that _this,”_ he pointed at Tarrant, “is what the Federation do to _us._ It is unacceptable _in_ us.”

He waited in case someone wanted to say “But you did it” or even “But you _do_ it”; to point out his hypocrisy, but it seemed no one wanted to. They saw the difference.

Without further comment he pushed the still-vacant Tarrant gently down onto one of the recliners, and began attaching connector pads to Tarrant’s temples. The rest of the crew, chastened, found other things to do. Dayna offered to help Avon with the de-programming, but there wasn’t much more to do, other than wait.

It surprised him sometimes that he was still surprised. His crew were all children, even Vila who was only a few years younger than Avon was. Most of them had never known Blake, who had spent four years of his life thinking he was someone else, or Gan who had had had a metal plate stuck in his head, inhibiting his actions, or Jenna, who had been programmed, like Blake, to live a dutiful existence and had only recovered when she’d seen her mother killed in front of her.

For Vila, who _had_ known the former crew, conditioning was something you could shake off in an afternoon, rather than something that ruled your life. But for Avon, there were few things more terrifying than that loss of self. Just telling someone what to do was different; they still had the freedom to object or if not object, at least resent it. No wonder, Avon thought, that Blake had refused to give up.

He left Dayna to monitor Tarrant, made his excuses and went back to the drive room to watch the star drive pulse and flare with energy. By the time they were back at Xenon, Dayna shouted through that Tarrant felt well enough that he was going to take the Scorpio in – a difficult manoeuvre that the rest of them could generally manage, but never without Avon knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of the flight console. Tarrant, meanwhile, could do it so smoothly you hardly noticed you were touching down – at least, he could… normally.

“Well now, that sounds like a recipe for death and … disaster,” Avon said as he returned to the flight deck, which looked more subdued that it normally did. He shifted his gaze to the pilot’s seat, where Tarrant looked pale but no longer vacant. He wore instead the expression of fixed and noble concentration he usually wore when he was in a lot of pain.

“You’re sure about this?” Avon asked him. He didn’t want to endure Soolin’s piloting, but neither did he particularly want to trust a man who twenty minutes before hadn’t even known his own name to do a better job.

“Yes, _sire_ ,” Tarrant snapped with military crispness. Avon raised an eyebrow (so – he remembered all of that, did he?) and Tarrant looked up at him. The noble concentration relaxed into something more like a tired smile. “I feel much better, thank you.”

And it was possible, Avon thought, that he was actually grateful; that Avon had made the right choice by a member of his crew and that Tarrant appreciated it.

Unlikely, though. Probably unlikely enough that he might as well dismiss it now.

“Get on with it then,” he said without another look at any of the people he was responsible for.  

 

**Author's Note:**

> written for the prompt: Del Tarrant/Kerr Avon - mind control


End file.
